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@Ithekro: That's what they tell you to believe in at school in the states? I mean jews should have at least (obviously more than) access to their "biblical" homeland, but where do the Persian fit in, they adopted like Europeans an alien religion centuries after its inception, they have nothing to do with the region historically or politically (except for enslaving and cushitic tribes... i.e. jews and arabs), even today except as another cheap excuse for a war to fictional terror

... you know what, that's exactly what Germany was in the '30s, which is no surprise when one remembers that the politicians that set the foundation of that state have grown ideologically there. Nonetheless, at least they can offer this as an excuse, the Ba'ath regimes didn't even have that to kill each other.

I don't really see how your list applies to Israel, aside from the "constant state of war" point.

I don't really see how your list applies to Israel, aside from the "constant state of war" point.

Then it would be about time to take off the blindfolds from your avatar and rethink what that state actually does to its poor people after they have suffered that hell again at the hand of foreigners, as well as the populations it has rightfully conquered

Dunno, try to think what the policies of the state aim at... conciliation and cooperation with the arabic part of their culture, or a "final solution" to their state's status quo

As I said, and will say every time, those people, like the germans in the beginning of the past century, deserve better than this state that rather invite its own citizens' death, in order to impose some messianic policy based on dubious european medieval literature

I really fail to understand how one could think that they are just in a constant state of war because of "evil flipping mad muslims" around them Do you seriously believe that their role in the region is something more than diverting attention from us and our interests Or that they have have have not built a nuclear arsenal to safeguard their government's messianic aspirations

As I said, I can understand why people in Europe and Americas are supporting this state, but its people deserve better then the fear of rockets and total war over generations, and we must learn to accept them back to where they belong, as well as they should discard their "leaders'" aspirations to become some biblical figure that will lead them to paradise through self-sacrifice and blind obedience, like their "hellish dark-skinned adversaries" leaders' preach

Then we can sit down and talk about the Perso-Arab-Muslim fundamentalism. which is a bigger threat to mankind then themselves (despite being the first to suffer from those delusion of grandeur, like nazis), since medieval christians, who almost brought about humanity's end

And to clear things out, muslims (whether arab, turkish, mongol or persian) are no angels, as well as europeans and their colonist in americas, BUT as long as those terms are a dividing lines fueling harted between them instead of cultural exchange, the region is bound to far worse, among all of them the jews share the most with arabs historically and culturally (albeit not religiously), and is quite sad IMHO that they both reject their rich heritage and adopt soviet/nazi standards of governance 10 and 50 years after those regimes not only failed, but lead to the near eradication of the poor people that idiotically supported them

EDIT/PS (and an important one at that): I might write a little bit aggressively, but this is more of a reaction to the lack of an opposing opinion being heard here... all thing considered, personally I stay in the middle, not justifying either (modern) side of the current conflict, and with the people of both sides, as well as the external "experts" that are mislead by short term interests of their "chosen" leaders.

No, really, really. I studied the period. I know the bleeping history very, very well.

You're talking from a very, very strange point of view. I had to do a double take and rethink where you're coming from, and I'm starting to get it:

Your conception of the Middle East is against the academic and journalistic and geographic and just about every other thinkable use of the term possible. Why?

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You still are talking about Persians not Arabs, which did not enter the main Middle East politics until much later.

...because Iran, Iranian culture, and what can essentially be called the Iranian world is most certainly, in every single possible definition, part of the history of the Middle East since historic times.

You seem to conceive of "the Middle East" as a term that only somehow applies to the regions which is only the core of the modern Arab world or something, or assume a disturbingly uniform interpretation of a "Semitic" racial presence -- whereas the Middle East has always since before recorded history been a place where peoples mixed and mingled and warred and raped and lived and built civilizations after civilizations. You're doing it wrong. That's not how it works. Persia was a big player, has always been since Cyrus or even before (the Medes), and will continue to be -- the modern nation of Iran approximates only a limited portion of the historic importance Iranian peoples and states play in the history of the -entire- Middle East.

I don't mean just the Iranian plateau, nor the eastern Iranian world -- Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, etc. I mean in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in Syria, in Anatolia -- which is also very much a part of the Middle East, another one of your strange omissions. The Achaemenid Persians were the first empire that united [almost] the entire Middle East -- and one of the world's most influential, ever. The Parthians and Sassanids were native powers [though the Parthian royal house was from a nomadic tribe, Parthia assumed the Persian banner and included Persian aristocrats among their ranks], equals of the more foreign Rome. The Arab Caliphates inherited wholesale Persian medicine, Persian bureaucracy, Persian intelligentsia, Persian city-building even (Baghdad's round city model is classic Sassanid, as opposed to Roman grid; are you going to tell me Baghdad, or the nearby Persian capital Ctesiphon, isn't part of the Middle East?).

Your lack of understanding of the absolutely paramount importance of this heritage renders this argument essentially pointless. The Islamic Golden Age (which in itself was never actually peaceful) inherits more from Persia than it does from Greece and Rome. If you don't know this, you do not have a right to be teaching anyone about what thousands of years of Middle Eastern history really means, period.

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Subjects, not clients, that you can hardly call them states. Ypi are probably refering to nomadic warlords and not the states of the region that enjoyed peace (always relatively speaking considering the historical era).

The Banu Lakhm was an important Arab kingdom on the doorsteps of Ctesiphon, the Persian imperial capital, which participated in many Roman-Persian wars. The Romans also had clients on the other side.

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Nonetheless, you are right about Carthage, but their aggressive wars against Italic and Greek states spanned the last two centuries of a three thousand long history.

Plenty of wars during those thousands of years of history from everyone. I have no idea why you would ever think otherwise. Have you never heard of Assyria?

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This I have never heard before, do you have a first or even secondary source handy?

Judas Maccabeas' rebellion against the Seleucid basileus heralded a period of Jewish independence for the first time in many centuries, and the last until the modern history of Israel. This "Hasmonean"/Maccabean kingdom's successor/usurper, Herod the Great, I hope you've heard of the guy. He once executed an annoying Jewish religious radical.

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Now I see how you came to this conclusion, since you count as Middle East every region from modern Spain to Burma... that is more or less half the "known world"

WTF are you talking about? I'm not talking about the Islamic world (which wouldn't include Burma anyway).

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I am not saying that it was good, but you are extending isolated events into everyday life over centuries.

And I am saying there are plenty of records of constant warfare, tribal conflicts, and so on, throughout the periods you had the gall to call "peaceful." You have no bloody idea how Middle Eastern wars worked if you really think it was four battles a war and everybody went home.

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As for muslim brotherhoods as a group of nutcases finding a solution to their miserable lives through the promise of an afterlife, I guess the other two Abrahamic religions have a lot older ones

I guess I have to give the date to make the point: 1928. British occupation.

Stop using the wrong terms or plastering propagandistic universal pictures of a highly complicated state. I have issues with Israeli policies, but calling them Nazis bring very serious questions regarding your possible judgments on them.

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I was talking about the general cultural group historically populous in that region, and its cultural elements prevalent. You want to hear similar spicy comments about other groups, like Anglo-Saxons, Mediterranean Europeans, Germanic people, Persians, Chinese, Japanese, or Africans to make you feel better

I still have no bloody idea what you're trying to say, except that every evidence you called to support it is wrong.

How are the Persians not part of the Middle East when where they live is considered part of the Middle East?

Also, historically, they've been a fairly major force in the region at least since the Medes Empire in the 7th century BC. It seems to have been in or the center of one empire after another until the 20th century and the fall of the Qajar dynasty.

The main fighting areas seem to be between Persian borderlands and modern day Turkey with a lot of it in present day Iraq. This is before Islam. After Islam the fighting shifts in places, but not all that far. Later on they have to contend with the Russians from the north and much later British out of India.

I can't say what times were more peaceful for locals or not, but I wouldn't just toss Persia out of consideration because it is considered part of the Middle East and its influence has been felt there for millenia.

@Irenicus: Look pal, throwing names of tribes, people, cultures, empires, etc. out of context and jumping from topic to topic to prove me wrong on opinions I don't particularly approve of but are common outside the western conservative ones that you were taught, does not help in discussing the 5000 years of history of a particular region, especially when you and Ithekro extend it to all the world that became muslim during its last 1000 years.

I am not your prof or some other kind of "expert" to tell people what to believe in, as you do here. I am stating opinions diverging from what is considered mainstream in the west, and very convenient among european conservatives.

Now if you really want to hear and later discuss how euro-communists, our contemporary national-socialists (whether abrab or israeli), fundamentalist muslim, russian and chinese understand the region's history and analyze its politics, NP.

But preaching one viewpoint that you have been taught, while discarding everything else as propaganda can not be called discussion, and I am not particularly interested in participating.

Remember that the original post I made, said that except the crusaders and isreal, every other non-arab group in the region, reduced in-fighting between the arabs, most of the "arguments" that followed are irrelevant to that, and hardly relevant to the topic of the thread.

Remember that the original post I made, said that except the crusaders and isreal, every other non-arab group in the region, reduced in-fighting between the arabs, most of the "arguments" that followed are irrelevant to that, and hardly relevant to the topic of the thread.

And I'm saying, that's bullshit. None of the three examples you listed to support this strange Eurocentric view were true. And since I wasn't in the habit of saying "that's bullshit" without giving reasons why, I did.

If I'm not going to list you the history of the region, what the hell am I supposed to do? Accept your wrong "opinions" as facts? I don't care where you think the Middle East will go -- well, I care, it's the thread, but in the different context of just speculation, and there it's a little harder to be wrong. But you brought up history, and you are everywhere wrong about it.

I'm a historian. I don't take kindly to historical revisionism, whatever its purpose.

@Irenicus: Look pal, throwing names of tribes, people, cultures, empires, etc. out of context and jumping from topic to topic to prove me wrong on opinions I don't particularly approve of but are common outside the western conservative ones that you were taught, does not help in discussing the 5000 years of history of a particular region, especially when you and Ithekro extend it to all the world that became muslim during its last 1000 years.

I am not your prof or some other kind of "expert" to tell people what to believe in, as you do here. I am stating opinions diverging from what is considered mainstream in the west, and very convenient among european conservatives.

Now if you really want to hear and later discuss how euro-communists, our contemporary national-socialists (whether abrab or israeli), fundamentalist muslim, russian and chinese understand the region's history and analyze its politics, NP.

But preaching one viewpoint that you have been taught, while discarding everything else as propaganda can not be called discussion, and I am not particularly interested in participating.

Remember that the original post I made, said that except the crusaders and isreal, every other non-arab group in the region, reduced in-fighting between the arabs, most of the "arguments" that followed are irrelevant to that, and hardly relevant to the topic of the thread.

PS: Over and out from me and off topic "discussions"

Than what I would kindly ask, is, "what do you define as the Middle East?" Because we seem to be talking about different places for some reason and it is making less sense.

At that is on topic, because it helps clarify the "Middle East" in the topic question of "Where the Middle East is headed".

Dunno, try to think what the policies of the state aim at... conciliation and cooperation with the arabic part of their culture, or a "final solution" to their state's status quo

I'm pretty sure they're up for conciliation and cooperation. It's anecdotal, but I've met a number of Arab-Israelis who were perfectly content with their lives in Israel. Israel also has its major road signs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Does that really sound like a state that's trying to maintain racial purity, or be as unfriendly as possible to Arabs?

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Originally Posted by Malkuth

As I said, and will say every time, those people, like the germans in the beginning of the past century, deserve better than this state that rather invite its own citizens' death, in order to impose some messianic policy based on dubious european medieval literature

Israel is a secular state, very similar to the United States of America. I occasionally hear westerns talking about Israel as if it's just another Islamic state, just with a different religious doctrine; the people who scream the loudest about this tend to be those who live in those Islamic states. It is incorrect, and thus I believe your remarks about "imposing some messianic policy" are incorrect.

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Originally Posted by Malkuth

I really fail to understand how one could think that they are just in a constant state of war because of "evil flipping mad muslims" around them

Why is this difficult to understand? The people of Israel were attacked by the neighboring Islamic nations even as the nation was still in the early stages of its formation, and before it was made official. Even after emerging victorious from the various assaults, Israel continued to be attacked over time. The difference between then and now is that back then the violence was fought with armies. Now that the neighboring nations have been forcefully pacified, the discontent emerges as violence from smaller organizations.

I think I know what's confusing to many people, though. It's been two or three generations since Israel was founded and since those early wars were fought, so why is Israel still under attack? It can't be because the neighboring Arabs are harboring such anger for that long - Israel must actively be doing something, right?

Look beyond the small-scale military operations that are usually in response to terrorist: the only thing that Israel is doing is existing. It sounds strange that simply existing could provoke such rage. There are a number of theories about this that I won't get into here, but you may want to ask yourself: why is Israel such a big deal? If you think this is about the killing of innocents, then how would you explain the fact that neither the 41,000 dead in Syria nor the approximately 2,500 killed in American drone strikes in Pakistan raised anger to the levels seen with the killing of the 16 or so that were killed in the most recent Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

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Originally Posted by Malkuth

Do you seriously believe that their role in the region is something more than diverting attention from us and our interests Or that they have have have not built a nuclear arsenal to safeguard their government's messianic aspirations

I think their desired "role" in the region is to live on land that was given to them by the United Nations, and the weapons that they hold are there to protect their lives and property from those who seek to do them harm. It's not so different from other countries, really - aside from the whole UN-granted land, of course.

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Originally Posted by Malkuth

As I said, I can understand why people in Europe and Americas are supporting this state, but its people deserve better then the fear of rockets and total war over generations, and we must learn to accept them back to where they belong, as well as they should discard their "leaders'" aspirations to become some biblical figure that will lead them to paradise through self-sacrifice and blind obedience, like their "hellish dark-skinned adversaries" leaders' preach

I really think you're confused... the leaders who talk about religious war and establishing a religious vision of the world do not reside in Israel, but in Gaza and some of the countries that neighbor Israel.

Out of curiosity, have you ever been to Israel, or any of the Arab nations around it? As I mentioned earlier, I get the impression that many westerners come to feel that everyone in the Middle East is the same, and that the only differences are which religious text they're living their lives by. This is an unfortunate over-generalization, probably for many of the Arab states but definitely for Israel.

"Iraqi parliament speaker Osama al-Nujaifi on Wednesday launched talks with
political leaders in Baghdad and the autonomous Kurdish region to contain a crisis
and avoid "civil war," his office said.

The initiative comes after Massud Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, said
Kurdish and Iraqi forces clashed in a disputed town last week and as both sides
issued warnings and reportedly sent reinforcements to the area."

"Critics of Morsi accused him of seizing dictatorial powers with his decrees a day
earlier that make him immune to judicial oversight and give him authority to take
any steps against "threats to the revolution"."

We heard many viewpoints from pretty rightwing Israelis, left wing Israelis and Fatah supporting Palestinians (no they didn't take us to Gaza because of security issues although I would have liked to hear those points of views too).

Basically however they didn't censor what anyone said. I thought the most extreme was the Rightwing Israeli who was mad that she had to leave her home when Israeli families were taken out of certain settlements.

The Palestinian talked about Israelis were now living in many homes that were once Palestinian homes in Jaffa (after many Palestinians fled during the start of the conflict). His view was that Israeli and Palestinians should share the country equally.

Also for people who don't understand right wing and left wing only is concerning the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. Israel is pretty much liberal on all other issues.

Anyways there are many views on this conflict from all sides. The problem is people think it is simply Israeli VS Palestinian view and it is simply not. There are also extremists on both sides sadly (I think this is the real problem and why there can't be peace because until Israelis and Palestinians realize that these people are their real enemies there will never be peace).

Of course Jerusalem is the other hot issue. Now personally while I respected the Arab Israeli's point of view I think the situation would be better if they could create a Palestinian state/Israeli state with maybe an international shared Jerusalem. The issue is if Palestinians and Jews share a country, Jews would always be a minority, I would never feel completely safe for Israel in this situation (sorry to be pessimistic but that is just how it. Israel was created for Jews to have their own country in wake of what happened in WWII). I think both Palestinians and Jews deserve their own country and they both deserve to be safe. I do agree with Israel's right to defend itself, but I don't always agree with the method they go about it (for many years I've been against the Israeli government's methods).

Oh and for someone who said Israel is run by religious nutsos who want to spread Messianic message, um no. The country is very secular. Yeah Israel does have problems with some religious nutsos (who don't work, don't pay taxes and don't serve in the army) but they are not in control of the country.

Oh and for someone who said Israel is run by religious nutsos who want to spread Messianic message, um no. The country is very secular. Yeah Israel does have problems with some religious nutsos (who don't work, don't pay taxes and don't serve in the army) but they are not in control of the country.

They might ot control the country but their political weight, given the way Israel politic work, is way bigger than it should. Pretty much any coalition in power will need their votes.

They might ot control the country but their political weight, given the way Israel politic work, is way bigger than it should. Pretty much any coalition in power will need their votes.

Oh I agree with you they are a definite problem (and a lot of Israelis feel the same way). I think they have too much power considering they don't even pay taxes or do anything beneficial for the country.

I am just saying Israel does not equal this group, like some people are talking.

My personal analogy: Israel=Americans, Palestinians=Native Americans. Native American probably saw those colonists as invading their lands. It's not hard to see the Palestinians thinking the same of Israelis. The US only had peace with the natives and assimilates them into citizens after they were subjugated by force. Which Israel did to Palestine already, so hopefully all that's left is for the losing side to accept the peace terms imposed on them. Might makes right after all.

Also, why was Israel built on their current borders? I mean, why not the supporting nations share their lands for Israel to build on? Why impose it on unwilling Palestine?

My personal analogy: Israel=Americans, Palestinians=Native Americans. Native American probably saw those colonists as invading their lands. It's not hard to see the Palestinians thinking the same of Israelis. The US only had peace with the natives and assimilates them into citizens after they were subjugated by force. Which Israel did to Palestine already, so hopefully all that's left is for the losing side to accept the peace terms imposed on them. Might makes right after all.

Perhaps but Jews were living in Israel before 1948, obviously a lot more came after that. There was also an immigration quota on Jews entering the country before 1948 (although there was illegal immigration happening). Also before 1948 it was no one's land. It was a British mandate. The original plan was to create a Jewish/Palestinian state even back then, it didn't work out.

It was not a B&W issue and both sides have their faults and legitimate complaints (and both sides even have conflicting views on what really happened during certain events). People like to find analogies to other conflicts but I honestly I don't see anything similar.

It was not a B&W issue and both sides have their faults and legitimate complaints. People like to find analogies to other conflicts but I honestly I don't see anything similar.

Conflicts in history never have been a B&W issue (are you saying the conflict with Native American were a B&W issue? surely not). Conflict by (personal) definition means both sides always share the fault.

Israel and Palestine is just history repeating itself. It's happened many times before everywhere else, and will keep happening in the future. Such is human nature.